HTML5 is a language for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. It is the fifth revision of the HTML standard and as of November 2011 is still under development. Its core aims have been to improve the language with support for the latest multimedia while keeping it easily readable by humans and consistently understood by computers and devices (web browsers, parsers, etc.). HTML5 is intended to subsume not only HTML 4, but XHTML1 and DOM2 HTML (particularly JavaScript/EMCAScript) specifications as well. Many features of HTML5 are provided to enable its use on low-powered devices such as smart phones and tablets. HTML5 supports a variety of techniques to enable dynamic content presentations, including multimedia display elements (such as video, audio, and graphical animation), application caching, background threading, and integrated scripting support.
HTML5 is a disruptive technology and a set of standards. One of its many advantages is allowing apps to run inside a browser, and breaking the model of apps having to be native code and distributed through an app store, or manually installed to a device by a user. This is exceptionally attractive to developers who want to develop apps and sell them without having to share their revenues with app distributors or platform manufacturers. In addition, with HTML5, web apps running inside the browser provide an opportunity to support multitasking and to break from the fragmented world of apps under different operating systems and platforms. This provides an incentive for developers to move to HTML5 and away from native apps, since multitasking has been a leading request of users of mobile platforms. In addition, developers only have to develop one app in HTML5, and it will run on all platforms that support HTML5.